Fig. 1

Flow Chart of Inclusion Criteria. Twelve patients scheduled to undergo carotid endarterectomy and 7 patients underwent coronary artery endarterectomy with coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) were recruited for the study, while11 patients scheduled to undergo carotid endarterectomy successfully completed T1w images and T2w images in vivo scans. After carotid endarterectomy or coronary artery endarterectomy with CABG, 12 carotid and 7 coronary atherosclerotic plaques respectively were obtained for ex vivo T1w images, ex vivo T2w images and ex vivo CATCH scans. Among the 19 subjects enrolled initially, 2 were excluded from the ultimate analysis: one (coronary plaque) was due to poor imaging quality, while the other (carotid plaque) failed to histology matching owing to specimen damage. Ultimately, 10 in vivo plaques and 17 ex vivo plaques were included for analysis, yielding a total of 236 in vivo locations, 328 ex vivo and matched histology locations